August 2020 - By Walking Away

Curtains, curtains, curtains. Why are you so expensive?

One of the biggest expense when you move in to a home are the window treatments. Thankfully, the windows to our home came with 2″ faux blinds, so curtains for those windows could wait. The sliding door window though, that one was left out. What are you supposed to do with sliding door windows anyway? Thaaat’s a project for another day… we needed some privacy ASAP.

In the past, I usually give up on finding long enough curtains that barely “kiss” the floor because they’re hard to find and expensive. This time, I was determined to find a better and inexpensive solution. Even if it was just for a season or until our budget allows. And, nobody wants their windows to look like they are wearing high water pants!

While I was on my quest of finding inexpensive or DIY curtains in white, we put up adhesive wall hooks and hung what we had on hand, which were a set of typical 84″ curtains.

If you’ve ever looked up DIY curtains, you are probably familiar with drop cloth curtains. I was excited to try them out. So I followed a tutorial on how to bleach and whiten curtains. Off to Harbor Freight I went. I bleached my curtains for a few hours… and they came out looking the same. Turns out, the drop cloths at Harbor Freight are not 100% cotton. The drop cloths have to be 100% cotton in order to bleach. Oh well.. I put them up anyway. But, they were too close to the color of the wall for my liking. So I left them up anyway while I found 100% cotton drop cloth.

This was our lovely setup for a few days:

Until… I was browsing around at Target and found these!

$18.99 for a white tablecloth that is 60″ x 104″. Yes please. I bought two of them.

All I needed was the curtain clip rings, which I already had.

Before I hung them up, I measured them and gave them a wash.

After a wash they did shrink about an inch in each direction. The second tablecloth was two inches shorter. In the end I was left with two panels that were 101 and 99 inches, so they don’t match exactly in length. In the future, I will probably buy the next size up, which is 120 inches long and I will hem the ends. This will make it look a lot better once they are up anyway.

I ended up leaving the drop cloth as well. I thought the added texture served this window well. I’m excited to have the rest of the curtains up. Next up, bay window curtain rods. Oy vey.

We’re finally in our new home!

The very first project we wanted to tackle was finishing the garage. We love our old cars and we love working on them ourselves. The garage being a place that is easy on the eyes and a place that inspires us to work on the cars is a must.

Before

The very first thing we did was texture the garage walls. Our home came with very basic taping that covered the screws on the drywall. Thankfully my uncle is a taper, so he came over to finish and texture the walls.

Walls after texture. We chose to match the texture inside our home, which is a skip-trowel texture.

We did tons of research on what we wanted to do to the floor. Our YouTube analytics are all over the place… We knew we wanted to finish it with something that is durable and easy to clean. Rustoleum has several products like epoxy that are easily accessible in home supply stores.

In the looks department, we are gray tone kind of people and we didn’t really want the flakes that these products usually come with. At first we thought we wanted the gray metallic finish, but we also didn’t really like the commitment of the swirling that has to be done. Our swirling skills are unknown, so we landed on keeping it simple. We chose Rustoleum’s Rocksolid polycuramine in Dark Gray without the flakes.

Prep

As with any project, prep is key. When you’re applying epoxy or in our case, polycuramine, prep is VERY important. After our research we learned:

Even if you have brand new concrete, you still have to prep
Sanding is preferable, but more expensive
Acid etching is “easier” for the typical homeowner
There are different types of acid to use. Muriatic acid is the most popular and least expensive, but it is also the most difficult and is harsher to use.

After much debate, we decided we would acid etch. If we didn’t like how the acid etch worked, then we would go the next step and sand.

First thing we did was sweep, blow out and vacuum the garage. We also scraped any pieces of plaster and unknown gunk with a small scraper.

Etching

We used Rust-oleum Clean & Etch. It was the safer choice for us as we were afraid of killing our plants if we got too messy on our driveway. One gallon of Rustoleum’s Clean & Etch was enough for our 2 car garage. The key was to keep the floor wet. We didn’t let it dry as we scrubbed.

Once we finished, we had 16 0z of baking soda mixed with a gallon of water on hand to neutralize the acid. Not sure if this is actually necessary with this type of acid… but we did it anyway. Cause we’re paranoid.

After the baking soda, we power washed the garage floor. The instructions to the Clean & Etch say to wash it out 3 times, so we figured the power wash was good. We did this a few times. The power washer helped with any residual gunk we didn’t capture with the scraper or the acid.

We were pretty happy with the etching. They say the floor should feel like 100 grit sandpaper. I was never convinced… but it did feel raw.

This picture eased my mind. You can see the pores.

Then… we let the garage floor dry for a couple of days.

Time for Color!

Before we got started on the fun part, we blew the garage out again one last time to make sure we didn’t capture any lumps.

We grabbed two 2 1/2 car garage kits. All the videos we watched said that you will need more than what the kit says you need. Also, a lot of videos stated that the colors were a bit different with each batch. So we used one bag from each box and mixed it in a bucket so that our colors would be consistent.

Another thing we did was buy our own rollers. A lot of reviews said that the rollers that are included with the kit are junk, so we bought two 1/4″ mohair nap, good quality rollers, one for each coat of paint.

We woke up early to beat the heat. The temperature was supposed to be 90 degrees by noon, so we started the epoxy at 7 am when the temps were around 80 degrees.

After following the instructions for mixing, we started cutting in the edges. The entire process took about an hour, which is exactly what the pot life of the polycuramine is. You can definitely tell it is thicker by the end of the job. Side note: not one of those tutorials we watched said that the polycuramine smells like urinal cakes.

This is after the first coat: